Last year, a little misfortune dropped West Virginia’s Brown Chicken Brown Cow String Band straight into Beaumont’s lap and this weekend, we’re reaping the benefits of that misfortune with not one but two shows from this incredibly fun indie/bluegrass/folk/blues outfit.

This is a mighty young band — ranging in age from 22 to 30 — especially considering that they play a lot of Appalachian bluegrass classics. But their energy and precision is incredible and they effortlessly criss-cross genres, playing original and cover songs that blend acoustic, folk, bluegrass and country sounds.

I talked last week with guitar/banjo/bass player and vocalist Justin Morris about Brown Chicken Brown Cow’s sound and about the misfortune that brought them to Beaumont in the first place.

Q Tell me a little about the band.
A Well we’re a four-piece string band from West Virginia and we write a lot of music. Everybody in the band’s multi-instrumental and sings, so we like to trade instruments. I’ll write some songs on guitar that I sing, then everybody plays the songs that I write and someone else will write and we back them up. Everybody writes music and we just kind of put songs together a lot. We do some covers, but most of the time we’re playing original music.

Q How did you originally form?
A We all happened to be bumpin’ around the same town, which was Lewisburg, W.V. … We just all bumped into each other and just started hanging out having a drink after work and playing tunes together. People started coming over to our house to hear us play and we got to the point where we had too many people coming to the house so we started playing out. We had one show in public and Xander and Orion moved to Hawaii because they had the travelin’ bug. Everyone just kind of quit their job and moved to Hawaii for eight months and started this band. It was really random. None of us planned on being in band professionally when this band started.

Q How long have you been a full-time band?
A It will be three years in September.

Q Have you ever played in Beaumont?
A It’s actually very ironic how we got to Beaumont. We’re totally independent. We don’t have any management or anything, just a laptop and an iPhone. We book our own shows and we were coming throught Texas last year just about this exact same time and my computer crashed and we were hurting. We lost recordings and schedules and dates and I just entered in my iPhone ‘computer repair’ and the phone took me to the Logon Café. They didn’t know who we were, we were just these four guys on the road. He said he could fix my computer, but it might be all day. So we set up camp there at the Logon Café. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner there and we ended up getting our instruments out and jamming and made some friends. We’ve come back through Beaumont ever since.

Q How would you describe your sound to someone who’s never heard your band?
A A lot of people been asking us that. We had a newspaper over in Hawaii that did a story about us and one of the main things they were talking about is they couldn’t lock us down in a genre. That’s one of the things that we’re kind of happy about is that our fans have started calling our sound — it’s not bluegrass or jazz — they’re calling our sound Brown Chicken. We’re kind of coining our own genre so I don’t know. I guess time will tell if that will stick.
We grew up in West Virgina listening to all the old-timers play. Back in the day, folks came through Ellis Island and settled all along the East Coast … In Appalachia — he pronounces it “Appalacha” — a lot of people were poor so they played music and all the sudden you had all these different cultures trading songs. Appalachia music is kind of like it’s own thing. We used to tell people we were just an original Appalachia string band but really a lot of our fans were the ones who kind of put the idea in our head that you should call yourself brown chicken ‘cause you don’t sound like anything else.

Check ‘em out this weekend — hell, you’ve got two opportunities to do so — and get an idea for yourself, since words just don’t do their sound justice. If nothing else, you can be rest assured their facial hair and hat selections will be above average.